


Nalyevo

by Gryphonrhi



Category: Marvel, The X-Files
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Hand-wavy Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:46:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryphonrhi/pseuds/Gryphonrhi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Right voice, wrong assassin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nalyevo

The room reeked of cheap cigarette smoke, musty fabric, and sick old man.

It was a dim, dingy hotel room, under-lit by yellowed bulbs which were struggling in vain against the fog of smoke in the air. The Smoker didn't care. Cigarettes comforted him with their familiar rituals: rolling one to check the seam's integrity, tapping it to settle the tobacco, positioning the filter between his lips, and lighting it to suck in that first warm taste of smoke.... The exhaled smoke soothed him too, familiarity and security both, a tool for concealment, distraction, or metaphor.

Much of that comfort evaporated when the steady rise of cigarette smoke wavered in the still, barren room. Trapped in his wheelchair, the Smoker smiled a little, mirthless, contemptuous. "It took you long enough to get here."

There was no answer from behind him and he shrugged, drew on the cigarette again, and blew the smoke out, studying the patterns as his empty hand moved, slowly, slowly, gravity-tugged not deliberately, towards his gun.

"Too silent for Mulder. No sound of a safety so you're not Scully. No claim of a warrant or just a bullet through the head from Skinner. Not Krycek; he'd have set the place on fire or blown it up instead."

The lights went out.

The Smoker dropped his hand to his gun, bringing it up under his lap blanket, and went still again. The door hadn't opened; that he would have seen. So his intruder had come in through the bathroom window behind him and already knew where he was sitting. Any attempt to flee would give him away in the noise of wheels on the cheap vinyl floor. The Smoker was confined to a wheelchair by his enemies' incompetence, and had been trapped in poverty by his need to keep them from achieving competence. Now that they'd found him, he could access his accounts again, pull enough to get him away and have a stash again. If he survived this.

The Smoker's sense of smell was long gone, but the hairs on his arms stood up just as a hand tightened around his gun-hand, blanket, gun, flesh and all. A hand, but not a flesh one.

Years of practice kept his voice calm, dry, and cynical. "Hello, Alex."

Bones cracked under that hand, crushed against the metal of his gun. His throat, unbidden, make a creaky, keening sound; his finger spasmed against the trigger.

The gun didn't fire.

"Wrong man," said a familiar, husky voice. The Smoker's gun was twisted away, damaging his hand further, a sensation that painted flashes of red and orange across his mind if not his vision.

It took him a few moments to realize the lights were on again.

"Wrong name, maybe," the Smoker gasped out, wheezing for air against the pain. "Right voice."

"Really." Now the voice had an edge -- surprise, interest, _something_. And an edge was something that could be pried open.

"Yes, really. Well, well. Amnesia, Alex?"

Hands grabbed his shoulders from behind, tightened down, twisted and gouged in, and the pain didn't just spit fireworks across his thoughts, it sheeted lightning across his mind. The Smoker came back to himself to nerves running red with pain, smoke fading up to the ceiling, and an unpleasant wetness running down his shoulders and down his legs.

"I'll ask the questions." That same voice he'd once given orders to, a voice that could sound like an eager young agent or a man who'd been drinking whisky while he debated how best to kill you.

Calm, the Smoker needed to stay so much more calm than he felt. His heart was trying to pound out of his chest, his lungs were desperate to find air through years of nicotine poisoning, and his ass was getting cold from his own piss soaking his pants. But he didn't believe in letting enemies think they'd won, even on the rare occasions when they had. "So ask."

He felt the collarbone snap more than heard it, and had enough sense to bite back any words even when he couldn't keep the noises controlled. Silence fell around them again finally, fell and held until the assassin asked, "Who do you think I am?"

"Alex Krycek." The Smoker didn't give any more information.

The assassin let him wait a full minute at least before he spoke. "Why do you think that?"

"The voice is right, the left hand isn't, and you're here to kill me." The Smoker didn't poke at his amnesia again, but he did mark it as a sore spot and possible vulnerability. He kept his tone down to disdain instead of contempt as he added, "Then there's the accent. Not American enough and a little too much Eastern Europe. Are you sure the Russians are the best allies you could have picked, Alexei? They've betrayed you twice already, after all."

The laughter... wasn't Krycek's. But if he wasn't Krycek, who was this?

"Oh, no. They've screwed me more times than that, old man. Which of us did they screw this time, do you think? You, me, or both?" He appeared in the Smoker's field of vision at last... and he wasn't Krycek.

A little shorter, slightly different cheekbones, but the same voice, much the same accent, definitely the same cynicism, and a face that had to be within two generations of Krycek's. The Smoker's eyes tracked from the dark eyes, which could be contacts, to the shining left arm. It was a bright steel alloy of some type with no attempt at any pretense of flesh but all the supple response of blood, bone and muscle.

It might as well be an engraved calling card.

The Smoker nodded slowly, cynical, amused, and almost resigned. Almost. "I'm the one with the injuries. Which one of us do you think they've gotten this time?"

The hired killer dropped into an easy crouch, those bright mocking eyes intent on the Smoker and his mouth curved into a smile with no mirth to it. "You're only still talking to see if you can say something worth your life."

The Smoker reached for his cigarettes but the last one had smoldered out on the linoleum and the pack was simply gone, as was his lighter. Somewhere in the pain, he supposed. Or the Winter Soldier had wanted a smoke later. "You'd do the same."

"You've already given me his name," Winter Soldier said, and the Russians' accent coach was clearly excellent; that was a _very_ good New York accent now. "A killer with my voice, my accent, and my arm--"

"Yours goes to the shoulder, I heard." The Smoker let him arch an eyebrow, not really an answer, before he went on, "Alex only lost his to mid-bicep. Carelessness on his part, bad luck on yours, but then, the son _should_ outdo the father, shouldn't he? Or maybe that's do better--"

The blow slammed him back into the wheelchair, the wheelchair back against the bed, his head back against the chair frame, his blood onto the floor.

When the Smoker blinked the water out of his eyes, the Winter Soldier said almost gently, "I have enough to go on." He smiled then, cold and dangerous as Krycek -- no question in the Smoker's mind they were related -- and added, "And just so you know? No one paid me to make this a difficult death. Except you."

"Krycek is dead," the Smoker said, trying to sound calm and mostly succeeding. "And you _have_ been paid. Now you know about him. Why kill me? You don't intend to go back to your handlers, so why do what they want?"

"Not all that dead or you wouldn't have put him in the list of people who couldn't be in your room. No. If he is my son," and the Soldier's voice was cold as his namesake, "Alexei Krycek probably plays tag with death as well as I do." The smile hadn't wavered. "And of course I'm going back, old man. I have questions to ask about another assassin with my voice and some of my luck."

His metal hand was cold as it crushed the Smoker's neck. The Smoker's last thought was that no, it wasn't an easy death -- but if Krycek lived, if the Winter Soldier teamed up with him... whoever had sent the Soldier wouldn't die well either.  


_~~~ finis ~~~_

_Comments, Notes, & Miscellanea:_

_Nalyevo_ is Russian for 'on the left' and it can also imply black market dealings.

This fic was originally written because one night when I was listening to _Once Upon A Time_ (I had looked away), I thought, "That sounds like Krycek." It wasn't; it was Jefferson, the Mad Hatter, played by Sebastian Stan, who also plays Bucky Barnes in the recent _Captain America_ movie.

In Marvel comics canon, Bucky ends up the Winter Soldier, a Soviet-run assassin with not much memory other than what he needs for his missions, and a left arm that's solid metal up to his shoulder. In _X-Files_ canon, Alex Krycek is at least a double agent, possibly a triple or even rogue agent, and canonically speaks Russian and has Russian connections. He's also been screwed over by them, more than once, and also lost his left arm.

Given all that, a fic playing with it seemed inevitable to me. I could have done without the Cigarette Smoking Man talking to me while I wrote this one, but he's gone again -- good enough. He's always a pleasure to kill.

Many thanks to lferion and raine for the speedy beta. More thanks to rokeon, kickair8p, medie & seferin for icon help! 


End file.
